Yes. I like to use my cigarette analogy here.
You can’t smoke if cigarettes don’t exist.
The pushback from reality? You can’t smoke if you don’t have lungs.
That’s the tension of conditions.
They’re ever present, but, they don’t need to violate consent.
What I like about Ec is that, starting from consent, that is deeply Nietzschean (no offence meant if you don’t like him) and philosophical. As it is obvious that he never assumed a starting point, had to arrive at one, and very evidently the question he asked to get to it is philosophy itself: what matters?
Only what matters exists.
ONLY.
What matters exists.
I think maybabyhaps where FC and me split is where we place the burden of existence. He on what things that matter matter to, so using the grammatically simpler and better way to say that, what values. Me, on what is valued, simplified: what matters.
Where is the ACTION.
I believe what matters alows less mistake, as at no point does it even contain the question of existence. Not at anywhere does “existence” require justification, such as “because it does not not exist.” Existence doesn’t answer to you. You answer to it. Is my view.
However it cant mater if there is nothing to matter to.
Im not saying the focus of life shouldnt be on what matters. Im saying that ultimately, the mattering and the valuing are the same. Something must matter to itself (it must uphold itself as a standard) for anything else to be able to matter to it, just like there must be something that matters to it for it to matter to itself.
Indeed the latter is the more Nietzschean thought, the true perspectivism, pure presence. Except in a case like Alexander, where things were made to matter so they could be conquered. But that is a very rare exception, the case of Greece’s vengeance on Socrates.
Absent such a case it is hard to see where humanity ever produced a fully fledged monad. Maybe in the Yellow Emperor.
Khan doesn’t qualify because he only had the vanquishing aspect and not the cultivating one - except if you take that very literally and just reckon with how many women he impregnated. Offspring of his army is said to be a significant percentage of Central Asian population. His invasion kind of bottlenecked at the Bosporus, so perhaps most of his army ended up settling there and making sure whatever nation would arise would be in their spirt. It is perhaps the most difficult piece of land in the world to maintain, between the Christians, the Russians and the Arabs. My experience with Turks has usually been good, there is much Greek in them. But Greeks are clearly less hungry, more Apollonian. Still, if culture rises from passion, it would be pleasant to be able to hope for something like a Ionian Spring someday.
Experience naturally is the driving force of all we are discussing here.
Experience as a force is interesting.
Experience is an engine, valuing is a wheel.
valuing is first, the wheel alone is more complete than the engine alone. It runs downhill, down the hill of time.
Experience is how the wheel is able to go up the hill. Against time, reflecting on itself, having memory, building backwards in time through science, conjuring the past and from that, manipulating the present and controlling the future. Science interrupts time, goes back at causes and behind them and generates them artificially, it operates inside of time rather than only as a process of time.
“Im not saying the focus of life shouldnt be on what matters”
The focus of philosophy, says I. The focus of life is already on what matters.
Right. But then there is no way back and no small way about it either. It can’t be gradual, it has to be a proposition worthy of the destiny of mankind across the millennia.
Essentially it has to invert Plate’s commandment, which was:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtxbIkfDDO4[/youtube]
What if unity is only ever illusion?
And also, multiplicity is a multiplicity of unities.
Is counting really the task of philosophy? Naming maybe. Continuous experience, there’s a name. But when the counting starts, an agenda is suspected.
You may have experienced counting. But you have not experienced one-ness. Because that doesn’t make sense. One is a number. Not an experience. You may have experienced a feeling of one-ness, which feeling is the stuff of illusion, but not one-ness. That’s good enough for mistics, alchemists of feeling, but is it proper for philosophy, the task of clarity?
The sole function of philosophy is to ensure that the right kind of questions are being asked - nothing more / nothing less
Clarity can in part come from that although philosophy cannot answer any questions - if it could then it would be science
To say that one is just a number is to impose a literal interpretation - one or oneness can be many things albeit only subjectively so
I can for example feel at one with myself which has got nothing to do with the actual number one because it is just a state of mind
No offence bro, but that feels like a non-answer.
Also what’s the deal? Am I talking to the same person?
Its not a non answer because one is not simply a mathematical quantity
Other examples may be less concrete but that is not of relevance here
So one can be referenced from religion - science - philosophy - psychology
One God - One Universe - One Reality - One Consciousness - One Humanity
One can also be the totality of existence expressed in its simplest form
One Man!
One Mission!
One Bad Mother!
Try this one yourself. Grab a pie, an apple, a piece of cloth - any one thing.
In itself it is whole and it is itself throughout its self, united as itself.
Now cut it up. Once it’s divided into 2 or more pieces, it’s no longer “one” in unity. Instead, each slice is its own unity, separated from other slices.
Voila, you have 2 or more things instead of 1 - and you did so by means of creating a gap within unity to make discrete plurality.
Except really, for all the air bubbles etc. in pies and apples, between the strands of fabric in the cloth - there were gaps all along in these supposed “unities of consistent identity throughout themselves”?
Well, there is no gap of nothingness in between these air gaps and that which they separate.
Really there is no gap anywhere, it’s all a continuous transition throughout an unbroken unity.
Unity by derivation just means oneness. One continuous thing is not divided into 2 more or more discrete pieces: with no possible gaps it fundamentally can’t be.
Fundamentally it’s unified throughout itself: fundamental unity.
I don’t know how to explain it any better, I’m sorry.
What you say about a superstition of mathematics is exactly what “divides up” Continuous Experience into discrete experiences. It’s not the truth that it’s divisible, but it’s useful to think so e.g. maths.
But I did have an answer to your question: it is that there cannot be an answer for the very specific and important reasons that I explained.
Resistance requires discontinuity, sure. But what resistance is there, fundamentally?
The universe unfolds unto itself effortlessly, it doesn’t seem to need any help, it has no struggle nor any motive to do any differently to what it’s doing.
It’s humans who come up against resistance as soon as we attempt to manipulate existence to be different to how it is: to exert power.
You need knowledge to predict and control: you need discrete experiences to exert power.
You need to see the world differently to how it is, through these means, for resistance to be born.
Until then, there is no resistance - just effortlessness and the inevitability of becoming.
Gaps are contingent upon this artificial division of Continuous Experience into discrete experiences.
Good find.
Yes, : but how similar and enough so to set up a continua toward a sufficient lack of objection to produce an inevitable pre-empiricism?
Probably not yet, for Platonism carries a type of transcendental that adheres :-
by virtue of genealogy.
Some scholars see a gap between the existing mythical and the new rational way of thought which is the main characteristic of the archaic period (8th to 6th century BC) in the Greek city-states.[17] This has given rise to the phrase “Greek miracle”. But if we follow carefully the course of Anaximander’s ideas, we will notice that there was not such an abrupt break as initially appears. The basic elements of nature (water, air, fire, earth) which the first Greek philosophers believed made up the universe in fact represent the primordial forces imagined in earlier ways of thinking. Their collision produced what the mythical tradition had called cosmic harmony. In the old cosmogonies – Hesiod (8th – 7th cent.
“I don’t know how to explain it any better, I’m sorry.”
That’s alright.
“It’s not the truth that it’s divisible, but it’s useful to think so e.g. maths.”
1 is still a number.
Silhouette
“The universe unfolds unto itself effortlessly, it doesn’t seem to need any help”
To make an effort does not mean to require help. And there is plenty of effort inside of the universe. Even my own efforts here alone are apparently required for existence to exist as it does. So I would argue that what the universe does is, like most of its inhabitants, follow at least generally the path of least resistance rather than that of no resistance at all. I may disagree with Experientialsm simply because I am not coming from an Experientialist perspective - and it seems to me Id have to depart from it to arrive at it. I cant make such a leap of faith; I simply trust my experience as it is over any thought about it, and as it is includes simply the world which I have come to know, however true my impressions may be it is my impressions which are the certain reality, not what they are impressed with - and all of this includes nuclear physics, which is where my journey once began because my father decided to teach it to me when I was 8 over the course of a summer. So my fundamental experience, my own personal experience is of the atom, as a theory yes, as a theory which allows us to split the atom, or to bind atoms together or to have them gradually alter into an atom adjacent in our table - it is all verified truth, and this is what experience means to me. Just what is there. And what is there, for example in the physics of atomic fusion and fission, is a threshold of resistance. That is what makes the gigantic fusion chamber of a star possible, that there is a threshold of resistance to be overcome. And so it is in all ranges of existence our experience reveal to us. Light is resisted by the substances it moves through and by the rate of its division we can calculate which substances these are - resistance is a medium, something existence uses to be something other than a perfectly smooth transition of potential, a perfectly homogenous field. And so precisely is our experience itself - this very experience here, me now and you now, different in time, bound in this post from a different perspective each and encountering each other as resistance, and thereby having the possibility of a debate, and a reason to bring things like this text into being. Even the very absence of knowledge served as a medium to early thinkers precisely because it formed a resistance, a things to put ones claws into, something which doesn’t instantly yield so that the effort was forced to take shape in time, acquire a character - there is a reason things are engraved in marble when they are meant to be remembered - the resistances of time itself are very cruel upon anything less resistant. Resistance, consistency, structural integrity - these are all ground-criteria derived directly from my own experience. All this said here is indeed no discrete experience, there is continuous experience of discrete entities. I realize only now I object to equating the concepts of “entity” and “discrete experience”. There are many strains of continuous experiences and the resistance between them is much of what they are experiencing. Sound, a spoken letter, A, is a whole artwork of resistances, through which the literal spirit, the breath, makes its way and takes shape. – This is what I asked really, when I wonder how one quantum of will to power could even “attack” another - what exactly provides the resistance, and how come this resistance isn’t absolute? What is this medium? And it turns out, it is the exchange of values which is resisted by the very value of the exchange. You can extrapolate this to philosophy, diplomacy, love, or the physical terrains where resistances gather powers around them which build until a threshold is met - and you can see it in the biological machinery of experience - resistance precedes experience, and is also the measure of experience when it comes.